Business groups - large, diversified, often family-controlled organizations with pyramidal ownership structure, such as the Japanese zaibatsu, the Korean chaebol and the grupos economicos in Latin America - have played a significant role in national economic growth, especially in emerging economies. Earlier variants can also be found in the trading companies, often set up in Britain, which operated in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Business groups are often criticized as premodern forms of economic organization, and occasionally as symptomatic of corrupt 'crony capitalism', but many have shown remarkable resilience, navigating and adjusting to economic and political turbulence, international competition, and technological change.
This Handbook provides a comprehensive analysis of business groups around the world. It examines the adaptive and competitive capabilities of business groups, and their evolutionary dynamics. 16 individual country chapters deal with business groups from Asia to Africa, the Middle East to Latin America, while overarching chapters consider the historical and theoretical context of business groups. With contributions from leading experts, The Oxford Handbook of business groups provides a comprehensive, empirically and theoretically rich guide for scholars and policy-makers.

Written in nontechnical terms, this book explains how the dynamics of big business have influenced national and international economies. A path-breaking study, it provides the first systematic treatment of big business in advanced, emerging, and centrally-planned economies from the late nineteenth century, when big businesses first appeared, to the present. Large industrial enterprises play a vital role in developing new technologies and commercializing new products in all of the major countries. How such firms emerged and evolved in different economic, political, and social settings constitutes a significant part of twentieth century world history. These essays, written by internationally-known historians and economists, help one understand the essential role and functions of big business.

This book, first published in 2007, presents research by leading scholars to an international audience of academics, business executives, and policy makers. This research is presented in two clusters. The first cluster of studies explores four cross-cutting topics, including surveys of the changes in industry structure, corporate strategies, plant technologies, governmental policies, finance, and corporate governance. The second cluster of studies comprises nine country surveys that examine the experiences of representative nations in chemical production and foreign trade. By combining the similar historical cases of a few nations (such as Sweden, Norway, and Finland), the authors are able to deal with eleven chemical-producing nations, including all of the leaders in this area as well as some of the important followers.

This book, first published in 2007, presents research by leading scholars to an international audience of academics, business executives, and policy makers. This research is presented in two clusters. The first cluster of studies explores four cross-cutting topics, including surveys of the changes in industry structure, corporate strategies, plant technologies, governmental policies, finance, and corporate governance. The second cluster of studies comprises nine country surveys that examine the experiences of representative nations in chemical production and foreign trade. By combining the similar historical cases of a few nations (such as Sweden, Norway, and Finland), the authors are able to deal with eleven chemical-producing nations, including all of the leaders in this area as well as some of the important followers.

Written in nontechnical terms, this book explains how the dynamics of big business have influenced national and international economies. A path-breaking study, it provides the first systematic treatment of big business in advanced, emerging, and centrally-planned economies from the late nineteenth century, when big businesses first appeared, to the present. Large industrial enterprises play a vital role in developing new technologies and commercializing new products in all of the major countries. How such firms emerged and evolved in different economic, political, and social settings constitutes a significant part of twentieth century world history. These essays, written by internationally-known historians and economists, help one understand the essential role and functions of big business.

This volume aims to explore the long-term evolution of different varieties of large enterprises in today's developed economies. It focuses on the economic institution of business groups and attempts to comprehend the factors behind their rise, growth, struggle, and resilience; their behavioral and organizational characteristics; and their roles in national economic development. The volume seeks to enhance the scholarly and policy-oriented understanding of business groups in developed economies by bringing together state-of-the-art research on the characteristics and contributions of large enterprises in an evolutionary perspective. While business groups are a dominant and critical organization model in contemporary emerging economies and have lately attracted much attention in academic circles and business presses, their counterparts in developed economies have not been systematically examined. This book aims to fill this gap in the literature and is the first scholarly attempt to explore the evolutional paths and contemporary roles of business groups in developed economies from an internationally comparative perspective. In doing so, it argues that business groups actually rose to function as a critical factor of industrial dynamics in the context of Second Industrial Revolution in the late nineteenth century. They have adapted their characteristic roles and transformed to fit to the changing market and institutional settings. As they flexibly co-evolve with the environment, the volume shows that business groups can remain as a viable organization model in the world's most advanced economies today.